Why Strava’s Fitness Tracking Should Really Worry You

As concern about Strava’s fitness tracking spreads like a contagion, thanks to the apparent exposure of U.S. military bases, there are good reasons for the general user to be concerned about the privacy of the popular healthy living app and its competitors.

That’s according to cybersecurity and privacy researcher John Scott-Railton, who told Forbes Strava could’ve done a better job of explaining the potential privacy impact of its products to users. “It’s almost impossible to anonymize individual location data. Moreover, even aggregate location data can still contain important signals about private and even secret things,” Scott-Railton said.

The ability to take publicly-shared location tracking data from Strava and use it to map out military locations was revealed by Australian student Nathan Ruser, who raised concerns over the weekend, though the maps were live as of November 2017. It is possible to turn off data sharing in Strava, which led to questions about why military personnel were sharing the information in the first place.